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A Sentimental Education |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / BOOKS FROM ABROAD |
| Author: Lynne Lawner |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 6/1/1995 |
| Size: 1,791 Words, 11,063 Characters |
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PORT-SUDAN
Olivier Rollin
Paris: Seuil, 1994
125 pp.
The mystery of an unfinished letter--a letter scarcely begun--fuses with a sense of duty toward a friend who has recently committed suicide, propelling a Frenchman self-exiled in the heart of Africa to embark on a quest. But in Olivier Rollin's novel Port-Sudan, which won the Prix Fémina last November, the narrator's attempt to learn what actually happened between his writer friend A. and A.'s mistress is doomed to fail. As is often the case in contemporary French and Italian quest novels, the search is for a newly discovered self as much as the external world and "the other."
The never-named narrator, a harbormaster making a living in desultory fashion by a bit of smuggling and other ignoble trafficking, has ...
. . .
... shot through with lucidity. At one point, on as confident terms with his reader as any nineteenth-century novelist, Rollin delineates it for us:
"Following along the course of such dreaminess, sometimes it would come to me to imagine a relationship as brief, blinding, and indescribable as the path of lightning between certain cloud-shapes of words, and the vertiginous heights of a storm."
(821 of 11,063 characters)
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